Eric's Beijing Diary

This evening I delivered a lecture to a bunch of young people who have come to China with a company that arranges study opportunities for foreigners. I was asked to talk about the historical developments leading up to the present business environment. Young people from all over the world are enlisting the help of organizations like this to bring them to China for language study, and to be introduced to the country. Chinese language proficiency is a hot item in the EU, especially Britain. In fact, there is now a well known British public (actually private) school that requires all children to study Mandarin.

I believe it is imperitive for every young person who has hopes of becoming involved in business in China to understand some of the historical events which have come together to produce the incredible contrasts of the past hundred years. Key to understanding the political economy of China is opium. But more generally, it is the fact that capitalism, as practiced before the Communist revolution of 1949, was all but entirely exploitive. Western countries came to China, made money, and took that money away. There was no "sharing of the wealth," except in the form of corruption. And the opium trade, which John King Fairbank called, "the most long-continued and systematic international crime of modern times," was enforced by the British in two separate violent conflicts known as "the Opium Wars." William Gladstone, who became prime minister of Great Britain, was a member of Parliament during the height of the opium trade. He stood up in Parliament and said, "I am in fear of the judgment of God upon England for her iniquities against the Chinese people."

So it is not really surprising that the Chinese might be attracted by a philosoply like Marxism, which teaches that business is evil, because the business conducted in China really was quite evil. But while Marx (and especially Engels) were quite perceptive in their analysis of the problem, their solution was wrong, because it did not take into account human nature, and because it was based on atheism. Since there was no absolute being to whom even the highest of state authorities should be accountable, the state itself was absolute.

What has evolved today in China, is a culture and economy that is still nominally socialist, but actually quite "Republican" in practice. How long will China be able to continue this contradiction between what the constitution claims to be committed to, and what the government actually practices?